Today we watched Porco Rosso, a film neither of us had watched before, and it was delightful!
Marco is an ace pilot who takes bounties to fight air pirates. Also, he's an anthropomorphized pig, known by most as Porco Rosso ('Crimson Pig' in Italian). There's a lot of really cool dogfighting scenes throughout the film, and an extended plane design sequence because Miyazaki loves his planes. But I don't even mind because it introduces the super great Fio, the mechanic who completely redesigns Marco's plane after the American hotshot Curtis shoots it down, and then goes with Marco to help him defeat Curtis.
The final dogfight between Marco and Curtis is awesome. It starts out as a normal one-on-one dogfight (after all the pirates take bets and make a sporting event out of the whole thing), then when their guns jam and/or they run out of bullets, they start throwing stuff at each other, while still flying their planes. When they finally run out of stuff to throw at each other, they land their planes and box it out. It's a really funny sequence of events.
There is an undercurrent of anti-fascism in the film. It takes place during the 1930s in and around Italy. Marco is a bounty hunter because he does not want to join the Italian air force under Mussolini (he's never named, but Marco repeatedly calls the government fascist). The pirates are pirates for the same reason. Only Marco's friend Ferrarin joined up, and he's constantly warning Marco whenever the air force or any other government agency goes looking for him.
When Marco is waiting for his plane to be repaired/re-designed, he spends his time in Milan, walking around in a trenchcoat and hat. The dude still sticks out like a sore thumb, and I have to believe Miyazaki was aping Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four comics where he has Ben Grimm aka The Thing do the same thing when he's undercover. You ain't fooling nobody, but since you're living in a fantastical world, everyone pretends like they don't recognize you 😛
That's all I really got. This movie was just super fun and charming (and the hostage schoolgirls at the very beginning were friggin' adorable!), and I'm really happy we ended our Ghibli watch with this movie.
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